In July, the Chinese Communist Party held its long-awaited Third Plenum, a meeting held every five years to discuss economic policy. One of the first policy changes to emerge from the plenum so far is a plan to raise China’s retirement age, a move that is long overdue but which may already be too late to address China’s pension shortfall and demographic decline. In fact, the winding evolution of China’s retirement age policy is a window into the difficulties of policymaking in China’s current economic landscape. While the rest of the world often assumes that President Xi Jinping can rule by fiat, even relatively straightforward issues such as the retirement age have challenged this image of a “get things done” autocrat.
China’s mandatory retirement ages—in fact, there are three of them—are currently among the lowest in the world: 60 for men, 55 for women cadres and 50 for women workers. In 1951, when these limits first went into effect, they made sense. After decades of invasion, war, civil war and internal dislocation, China’s average life expectancy at the time was 43 years old.
China’s long attachment to an early retirement age can be explained by its larger worry for decades: the challenge of ensuring employment in a society with too many people and too few jobs. Surplus labor has dominated the minds of Chinese economic planners and policymakers well before the advent of the reform era in 1978. The Communist Party is especially worried about unemployed young workers, as their potential for fueling protest and social unrest vastly outpaces the risk of angry pensioners in the street.